CREATIVE HEADACHES

A 'ghost drum'

           I’m in the process of turning the third Ghost World book, Ghost Dance, into a kindle.

          This has involved me closely reading all three books again, some 20 years after writing them, an odd experience.  I’m relieved to find that they haven’t made me flinch with embarrassment, or want to entirely rewrite them (though I have changed the odd word.)  In fact, immodest though it may be, I think they’re good.  If you like tales of shamans in dark, frozen Czardoms, of shape-shifting, wolves, witchcraft, spirit-travelling, and barking mad czars – these are your bag.

          But the books puzzle me.  I’m an atheist (I tell myself.)  I’m hard-headed and sceptical, me.  I don’t believe in gods, or other worlds, or witches, or ghosts, or any such nonsense.

          And yet I wrote these stories, which are all about spirit-travelling and following the Ghost Road to the Ghost World.  I may have taken some of the ideas from myth and folklore, but I chose to inhabit these characters and these worlds.  I could have written a story set in the solid, hard-headed world around me. But I didn’t.

          It wasn’t just a case of ‘making up a story’ either.  I remember, quite clearly, the compulsion I felt to write these books.  ‘Ghost Drum’ took me three years, and exhausted me, but I couldn’t give it up.  And as soon as it was finished, I wrote Ghost Song, which is Ghost Drum’s mirror-image.  In ‘Drum’, on midwinter night, a female shaman demands a baby-girl from her mother, and is given her. In ‘Song’, on midsummer night, a male shaman demands a baby boy from his father, and is refused.

As soon as Song was finished, I had to write Ghost Dance, driven by a nagging feeling of unfinished business.  I had wanted the barking mad Czar to be a central character in Drum – but he was pushed aside by other characters.  I felt I still had to write his book – and, in Dance, Czar Grozni is truly mad, bad and dangerous even if you don’t know him.

          I’ve long been drawn to the theory that the two walnut-like halves of our brains operate as individual personalities.  I think the one we’re less aware of – which has more time to put its feet up and day-dream – supplies all the best and most original of our ideas.  It knows what we really want.  It’s the ‘muse’ which whispers in artists’ ears.  (I’ve written more about my ‘muse’ here.)

          Some day I must blog about what I learned from Lucy Coats about ‘creative napping’, otherwise known as ‘a guided spirit-journey.’  One half of me finds it deeply intriguing and useful.  The other half is absolutely furious that it works; and the two halves end up scrapping like cats.

          One half of me is hard-headed and sceptical, all right.  Wants a reason and an explanation for everything.  It makes a great editor.

          The other half, the one that dreams up the ideas and images – well, that half is, and has always been, drawn towards the ghostly, the strange, the fantastic, the inexplicable, the numinous.

          There’s the ‘creative dynamic’ for you.  Pass the aspirin.

BLOT

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A BLOG TO CHILL YOU AT MIDSUMMER - THE ICE APPLE

'The Ghost Drum' by Susan Price

 

 

 

          'The Ghost Drum' is available for download at Amazon's Kindle Store, at £1.71

           'The ice-apple is rare. It grows in the far north, where no other trees grow.  Northern summers have no darkness. The ice-apple flowers in the summer, white and brittle flowers that spread their petals to white days and white nights with never an instant of dusk. But the fruit of the ice-apple sets in the northern winter, when midnight and midday are as dark as each other. The apple grows and ripens - and is harvested - without ever knowing an instant of warmth or sunlight. An ice-apple is as clear and transparent as the purest clear-water ice.'

          'Are there really such things as ice-apples?' I was asked, in a school recently.  Or, did I make them  up?  What gave me the idea?

          Well, there are there aren't real ice-apples.

          There are no such things as apple trees which flower and fruit in the Arctic - but while I was writing the Ghost World books, I read and re-read that marvellous book 'Land of The Firebird' by Suzanne Massie, and in it she describes how gardeners in Old Petersburg managed to grow all sorts of fruit and vegetables under glass and in hot-houses.  One of the apples they grew was known for its almost transparent flesh - and here's where my imagination took the hint, and I invented the ice-apple.

          I highly recommend Massie's book.

          'The Ghost Drum' by Susan Price, £1.71 from Amazon's Kindle Store.

          Find other e-books at Kindle Authors UK.